On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> Try reading the latest HTML 5 working draft then; e.g.:
>
> "Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable.
> Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find
> the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways."
That's true for pretty much all Working Drafts. It's why they're
Working Drafts, not Candidate Recommendations. That doesn't mean
they're not specifications. I'm not sure what you're getting at,
anyway, by trying to say it's not a specification; surely that's just
a semantic distinction?
> "The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft does not
> imply that all of the participants in the W3C HTML working group endorse the
> contents of the specification. Indeed, for any section of the specification,
> one can usually find many members of the working group or of the W3C as a
> whole who object strongly to the current text, the existence of the section
> at all, or the idea that the working group should even spend time discussing
> the concept of that section."
This is true of all Working Drafts -- a Working Group's publication of
a Working Draft doesn't imply that it endorses the contents. See the
W3C Policy documents:
http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/tr#RecsWD
> So it's a discussion document.
To be precise, it's a Working Draft. That means it's not yet
completely stable, but it's still perfectly reasonable for
implementers to try implementing it, and for authors to refer to it on
matters where it's been interoperably implemented. This is routine
and expected -- drafts can't progress until they have feedback from
implementers and authors, so both groups are encouraged to try using
them so they can provide useful feedback. W3C specs are not supposed
to only be used once they're finished.
In any event, HTML 4.01 is obsolescent and unmaintained, so there's no
reason to bother discussing inconsistencies. They won't result in any
changes.